savetheearth | friendship is awesome!

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friendship is awesome!

Who: Phillip and Ben
When: Monday, after school
Where: Phillip's house
What: A ~~playdate~~ meeting amongst friends who haven't hung out in a while.

It had been a little while since Phillip and Ben had gotten to hang out- their schedules were pretty different now that the other boy was in middle school. Since they weren't seeing each other all the time, plus Ben only recently winding up on the network, it'd made things kind of difficult. But now Ben was on the network too (Phillip still didn't know if this was good or not), they had more things they could talk to each other about. And probably some things they needed to talk to each other about.

Phillip honestly wasn't very focused on that, though. He made sure he had (most of) his chores for the day down, eagerly waiting for his friend to show up. This would be fun!

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He takes a breath before raising his hand to knock. It's been a long time since he last visited his friend. A while since he visited anyone at all! It's a little nerve wrecking, wondering how Phillip's family is, if they remember him, if they'll like him because he loves his brother but his clothes are hand me downs and he knows they don't look as nice as everyone else's.

But he has candy. He has gifts. He should be able to make a decent impression.

With a sigh... he knocks.

Gloria the golden retriever starts barking happily as soon as she hears the knock, and Phillip hurries up, yelling "I'll get it!" back to his parents. So Ben is greeted with a grinning Phillip when the door opens. "Hi!" he says, cheerfully, pausing only to reach back and make sure Gloria doesn't jump on Ben or anything. He'll pull her to the side so Ben can make it in the house.

He blinks at the greeting before he grins, nodding and stepping inside. With Phillip's hands full with the dog, he'll take the initiative to close the door behind him.

"Hey!"

What does he even say? Oh no. Aah.

"How are you?"

"Good! How are you?" It's ok, Ben. If you fall a bit behind on the conversation aspect, Phillip will be sure to pick it up.

His mother pokes her head out, smiling at the boys and saying hello to Ben before asking if they needed anything before she went into her office to get some work done.

He smiles as politely as he can at Phillip's mother, straightening his back and shaking his head. No ma'am, he's all right thank you for asking! But he also holds out the bag of sweets to his friend while his mother is watching.

"I got these from the store on Saturday. You can have some, too!"

"Thanks!" With this plus the valentines candy he was willing to share, they were going to have so much sugar. At, until his mom reminds them not to eat too much before dinner. Oh well.

"Do you want to go to my room?" he asks, once his mom heads back to her office.

He smiles sweetly until Mrs. Santorini disappears into her office. Then he drops the smile a little, remembering that he and Phillip had more in common now since they discovered their numbers, and that they've got more things to worry about now -- but he grins again and nods, taking off his coat.

"Of course! Let's get going."

Phillip shows him where to put the coat before heading up the stairs, Gloria deciding to trod along behind them and settling herself on Phillip's bed. The boy closes the door behind them, pulling out what's leftover of his Valentines candy. "You can have some of these if you want!"

"Valentine's candy?"

Aah, that's right. Phillip's still the age where his classmates would be told to hand out candy, isn't he? He must've just gotten a lot of them and had more than he could do anything with.

"What do you have?"

Part of the problem is there are a lot of girls in Phillip's class... and since he hasn't detached the candy from the valentines themselves, Ben might notice that anything that's from a girl either has extra candy taped to it or hearts drawn on it. Phillip's pretty popular. Not that he notices.

"Um... well there's some chocolate kisses, and skittles, and some small candy bars..." Here, you can look through it too to see if there's something you like.

"Skittles. Give me some skittles."

Fifth grade crushes are too much trouble. He opts not to point out the many hearts to Phillip because wow that's a lot of girls.

Phillip pulls out a couple packets of skittles and hands them over. He doesn't like those as much anyway. (And... good choice there, Ben. Phillip wouldn't know what to make of that.) "How's middle school?" He's not sure how he feels about the whole thing, but he's going to have to be there next year...

"Oh, it's horrible. You better grow now, Phillip, because nobody actually puts their books or lunches into those lockers!"

He pauses. Dramatically.

"... Just kidding."

.....Phillip's not even entirely sure what he's talking about, but he figures it's not important when Ben says he's kidding, so he'll just smile and laugh a little. "Are the classes hard?" He heard you had to switch to different classes instead of just having a homeroom.

"Not at all! And if you pay attention, it won't be for you either." He waggles his finger with an air of superiority, pulling open the bag of sweets and popping one into his mouth.

"And if you don't throw things at the teachers."

Phillip missed hanging out with Ben. He was fun. "Do people throw things at the teachers?" That seems really mean. And kind of dumb. Teachers can send you to the office.

He raises his eyebrows, mouth stuffed with artificially flavored and sweetened and colored snacks. He at least has the manners not to talk around them, so he swallows before he answers the question.

"Sometimes. But they're the stupid ones. Believe me nothing is as bad as the schools you see in movies."

Phillip understands that predicament- he'll be eating some chocolate himself. "That's good." All the movies and stuff he'd heard maybe middle school look terrible. Here, sharing more candy if Ben wants!

He takes the candy happily, dumping his own bag between them to share some of that good quality chocolate.

"It's not that different from elementary school. Honestly the only thing you gotta do is you have to do more work yourself. But that's like, duh."

"Well yeah. I mean, I've gotten more work every year." Seriously first grade was easy compared to now. "I wonder if that keeps going into high school and stuff."

"More work, less help, and more and more and more. My brother says you'll get armloads of work when you hit high school... but I think he's just making stuff up. My neighbor comes home just fine."

"I can ask Matt!" Matt's in high school, after all. Though... Phillip's not sure how much work Matt actually does. Mostly he sees him being super weird.

"Matt?"

He blinks.

"Who's Matt?"

"Oh! Matt's my neighbor. He's in high school. And he's on the network too! He's cool." Phillip like Matt a lot.

"Matt... Matt..."

That's a common name. He hasn't heard of him, though.

"What sorta person is he?"

"A nice one?" Hm. How to describe Matt. "He's kind of weird too, but he's funny and he's cool and I like him."

Well, a high schooler that gets described with such words cannot be too horrible.

"Aaand, he's a number? Which one?"

"Um..." Hm. What had Matt done on the network? "He was the guy who posted about hearing voice in his head when he made friends."

"... Oh, that guy."

A pause.

"Wasn't that the same number who posted about vending machines?"

Phillip considers that for a moment. "Maybe. It sounds like something he'd talk about."

"I think it was the same number attached to the post. So he's your neighbor?"

Phillip nods. "Yeah. I met him 'cause mom and dad got him to watch me one night." He refuses to call it 'babysitting.' "And he reminded me of someone from one of my Echos!" And then he proceeded to scare the hell out of Matt by recreating said echo.

"Huh." He leans back where he's sitting, picking another colorful candy out of his bag.

"Is there anyone else like that? I mean -- I've got a couple of people who remind me of people from the other me's life, too."

Phillip thinks for a second before shaking his head. "Not really. I mean, Matt doesn't even look like the person in my Echo, 'cause she was a girl. But he kind of... seems the same, I guess? It's weird."

"I wonder if you can change genders through Echoes. That would be really weird."

"Yeah. He said he was pretty sure he was a guy in his, but..." How would he know unless he got Echos of himself not wearing clothes or something?

"... Well. I guess at this point, anything is possible. Is he a good guy?"

"Yeah!" Phillip grins, nodding. "He's really nice."

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friendship is awesome!

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